Costumes proved something of a skeleton key in the second repertory program that the Martha Graham Dance Company showed last week. Graham herself designed the costumes for 1958’s “Embattled Garden,” as she did for her own works throughout most of her career. Trimmed with flounces, temptress Lilith’s dress has a Spanish flavor and seems to hark back to Graham’s roots in Denishawn, the Ruth St. Denis–Ted Shawn company in which Graham began her dance career during World War I. St. Denis and Shawn expertly packaged dance exotica from around the world for mainstream audiences.

The Graham company performed several of the Denishawn works as part of an instructive and entertaining program that eventually tackled the starkly unadorned territory of early classic Graham. Graham’s own choreographic lexicon was radically different from Denishawn’s, and yet a shrewd eye for theatrical appeal is a common ground between them. Graham knew how to dress a stage, dress an ensemble, and dress herself. She adroitly manipulated the trappings and accoutrements of theater, no matter how spare her theatrical landscape, no matter how forbidding her choreographic vocabulary could be to an audience accustomed to the diverting prettiness of so much theatrical dance of the time.

But the closing piece on last week’s program, 1981’s “Acts of Light,” dates to the triumphant end of Graham’s long, difficult, tumultuous life — triumphant by virtue of popular and official recognition. But at this point, something in Graham the choreographer had died, as she was less and less able to generate choreography out of her now aging body and her choreography was more than ever a collaborative effort with her dances. And by now, the costumes were not designed by Graham alone but in collaboration with Halston, to whom, it seems, Graham ceded authority to revert to the show business flash she had harnessed more effectively while she was at the helm.

While Graham had enjoyed putting the male physique on display, Halston‘s buttocks-baring centurion outfits in “Acts of Light” venture past the mean of fine line to which Graham, a rebellious spirit raised and shaped by the proper society of Santa Barbara, had adhered so profitably during her peak years. Watching “Acts of Light,” one can’t help but feel but something fatuous was now stamping her judgment.

“Acts of Light,” a rote recitation of Graham bullet points, could be a PowerPoint presentation for donors. There’s a long duet, beautifully danced last week by Jennifer DePalo and Maurizio Nardi, after which a dancer, here Blakely White-McGuire, enters enveloped in a jersey tube that bears a glib resemblance to the sheaths Graham wore for her early signature solos. But this role is now as superficial as her costume. The dancer performs movements recollecting those solos, but lacking is the urgency that made them so compelling. This woman just rattles about, distraught about something or other. The chorus of men is decorative but irrelevant. After that, the full company comes on in tights and leotards, and goes through a theatrical lecture-demonstration of Graham class exercises.

Here the Graham trope being recycled is her glorification of the dancer herself, her body’s trim prowess shown as an instrument of truth and expression.

The program opened with Graham’s 1946 “Cave of the Heart.” Like “Embattled Garden,” it is much concerned with sexual jealousy. One feels that the great lady was herself not entirely a stranger to this emotion. But here we’re being told the story of Medea, something quite a bit darker than the kinky mate-swapping of “Embattled.”

“Cave” was the rare occasion on which Graham cast herself as anti-heroine. Erick Hawkins, Graham’s husband at the time, originally danced Jason. Hawkins’s desertion of Graham four yeas after the dance’s creation was a blow from which she never fully recovered, and these real-life resonances cannot help but arise as one watches “Cave” today. The company’s current dancers, though, make the work their own. In the past it has sometimes seemed soupy and over the top, but last week it earned renewed respect.

“Cave” again demonstrates Graham’s always-vital use of a Chorus personification, danced now with wonderful ease by Katherine Crockett. She is both internal and external counterpoint to Medea’s murderous rage, the voice of societal context trying to stem disaster as well, perhaps as the voice of Medea’s own superego. Her struggles with Medea are a highlight of the piece.

Tadej Brdnik’s Jason was not a brute but rather the mythological warrior as eternal adolescent, enraptured with his new bride, oblivious to his own betrayal. As Medea, Miki Orihara was too slight and delicious a figure, too seductively flexible to be entirely fearsome, but this also made her murderous machinations more insidious. Ms. Orihara didn’t tear her passion to tatters. In fact, the entire work almost seemed like a work of delicacy, a succession of finely wrought theatrical duos and soliloquies.